40th AOP Awards Finalist Women's Boxing Photographer
Where strength, vulnerability and ambition coexist
This is a portrait project made with the boxer Vivien Parsons at Afewee in Brixton, built across several sessions rather than one shoot. Vivien came up through the club, took the England Boxing Youth title at under 60kg in 2021 and boxed to two national Elite finals after it. She coaches there herself now. Afewee is a registered charity and its boxing gym is on the bottom floor of Brixton Recreation Centre. What I was after was the shape of a career while it was still being made.
Several sessions is the method, not a detail. The first one buys nothing except permission, and everything usable came after that, once a camera in the room had stopped being an event. I shot it all in available light, black and white, exposed for the windows and the strip lights rather than filling anything in, and worked at the edge of the session instead of running it. Reportage rules on a portrait job: no repeats, no resets, nobody asked to do that again.
The full story behind the shoot and the shortlisting is in my piece on the 40th AOP Photography Awards. It sits alongside my portraits of boxer Lisa Moore at Lansbury ABC in east London, also Chantelle Reid of GB Boxing, photographed three months before the Paris Olympic Games.and the wider sports photography portfolio. For campaign, editorial and brand work, see commissions.
Being shortlisted in the 40th AOP Photography Awards mattered because this is the work I want to be commissioned for: one person, over time, photographed without being tidied up. If you are an editor, a brand or an agency after that, get in touch.